4/17/07: NOW TX

[Jason A.C. Brock]

Severe thunderstorm watch has been issued for parts of Western into Northwestern and Central Texas till 8pm. Tornado warning already been issued for Lubbock county as storm spotters have seen a brief tornado touchdown. Looks like a lowtopped supercell day with brief spin-ups and landspouts will be possible especially with these initial storms. Later threat may be more of a damaging downburst wind and large hail threat. May be heading SW soon.

 

[Bill Tabor]

Landspouts....interesting. I forget exactly what goes into forecasting these. Seems Davies had some info I was reading on that a couple of years ago too. Wasn't it horizontal vorticity that the storm rolls over and ingests that causes these? I should examine this day in more detail as we have 3 landspouts logged. Given these are non supercellular tornadoes. Also I wonder what the state of the art is nowadays in detecting landspouts by radar since they wouldn't have a parent mesocyclone to detect can these be seen on radar at all?